Lotus, Wordperfect and Harvard Graphics (you could add dBase later I guess too)

Good thing that they combined forces into one package to confront the MSOffice threat.Wait, WHAT? They didnt? They each came up with their own crap substitutes rather than working together?What kind of cretins would make that kind of a business decision?

ROFL

/Imagine how different the world would be if those companies could have changed their business models to at least confront the MS monster?

Every year I download Open Office, create a document, watch it crash, and I delete it from whatever machine I downloaded it to. There is a lot to be said about stability and Microsoft Excel and Apples Numbers spreadsheet apps have it.

make me some tea:nekom: I don't think I've ever used a Lotus product in my life, and I'm fairly old school.

Same here.

You can't be that old school if you never used it, because it was pretty much the only spreadsheet program around for a while. (If you're really old school, you used VisiCalc instead, but Lotus had eaten its lunch by the early '80s.) I remember playing around with it on an Apple II in my junior high computer club.

Back in 1991, my understanding of Lotus 123 helped me as a lowly summer student prove myself in a large advertising firm. I have fond memories and still some Function keys memorized, even though I haven't used it since the late 90s when I was forced to (as I worked at IBM at that time).

Not so! My youngest brother will be in mourning. He was a die-hard Lotus 1-2-3 fan back in the day, and considered Excel to be a clearly inferior product. It really chapped his hide that one employer after another insisted on using the MS Office suite.

/accountants can be weird//btw, subby...I liked the subtle double entendre about '86

I was too cheap to buy lotus 1-2-3, so I went with Quattro Pro instead. You could set it to use the lotus menus so it was the same for the most part. (They got sued over that. I don't remember who won.)

namatad:Good thing that they combined forces into one package to confront the MSOffice threat.Wait, WHAT? They didnt? They each came up with their own crap substitutes rather than working together?What kind of cretins would make that kind of a business decision?

Yeah, there'd be no concern about restraint of trade or anti-trust issues with such collusion.

Stone Meadow:Not so! My youngest brother will be in mourning. He was a die-hard Lotus 1-2-3 fan back in the day, and considered Excel to be a clearly inferior product. It really chapped his hide that one employer after another insisted on using the MS Office suite.

Superior, until MS Office suite. Lotus never had a superior word processor. By not merging with WP, they ended up with a Word clone. YAWNNNNNNNNAdd in the pricing trap. Why should we lower the price on our SUPERIOR PRODUCT!!!!!To increase the number of users and maintain market share. DUH.

Office might have been crappy, but they increased the size of the market, which destroyed Lotus' market share.

/so farking glad when people FINALLY stopped asking for a "version which will work on lotus". FARK you! We have an excel version. Grow up already.

labman:I was too cheap to buy lotus 1-2-3, so I went with Quattro Pro instead. You could set it to use the lotus menus so it was the same for the most part. (They got sued over that. I don't remember who won.)

Microsoft Word for a while had a mode where it used the WordPerfect hotkeys. Of course, F11 (reveal codes) did nothing but bring up a help dialog where you learned that reveal codes doesn't exist,

CheatCommando:namatad: Good thing that they combined forces into one package to confront the MSOffice threat.Wait, WHAT? They didnt? They each came up with their own crap substitutes rather than working together?What kind of cretins would make that kind of a business decision?

Yeah, there'd be no concern about restraint of trade or anti-trust issues with such collusion.

LOLno really, how would that have been antitrust?3 separate software companies merge. they dont have competing products. so no problem there.They continue to sell the 3 parts separately. so no problem there.They bundle the parts and sell the suite, which is exactly what the MS competition is doing.

so yah, where is the antitrust again?And yes, I could see MS trying to sue them to block this, but only as a stopgap until MS had taken over the world.lol

Fry'd Electronics still use some kind of DOS text mode point of sale and inventory tracking software. They even run it on XP in a DOS box, it's sad, really.

I can't laugh. We still use an AS/400 emulating System/36 code. Custom in-house software that we've never been able to find a replacement for that we like.I have a 3486 dual session terminal on my side desk, and I use it every working day.

Fry'd Electronics still use some kind of DOS text mode point of sale and inventory tracking software. They even run it on XP in a DOS box, it's sad, really.

That might actually be a terminal emulator with the actual system running on a mainframe or Unix system. There are a lot of legacy systems like that, and replacing them with something new can be ridiculously expensive.

The funny thing is, with web-based "software as a service" we are returning to that model, just with a web browser instead of a terminal. The circle of software keeps turning...

nekom:I can't laugh. We still use an AS/400 emulating System/36 code. Custom in-house software that we've never been able to find a replacement for that we like.I have a 3486 dual session terminal on my side desk, and I use it every working day.

At least System/36 is designed to be emulated like that. I mean, that was one of its original selling points.

Myria:nekom: I can't laugh. We still use an AS/400 emulating System/36 code. Custom in-house software that we've never been able to find a replacement for that we like.I have a 3486 dual session terminal on my side desk, and I use it every working day.

At least System/36 is designed to be emulated like that. I mean, that was one of its original selling points.

namatad:/Imagine how different the world would be if those companies could have changed their business models to at least confront the MS monster?

Wouldn't of made any difference what so ever. You couldn't write a word processor that'd fire up and open documents faster than Word, same for all the others really. The reason isn't that Microsoft's programmers where shiat hot... it's that Microsoft cheat. "Here are the complete API's for making a Windows program (except for the hidden bits we won't tell you about which are 10x faster)" doesn't really make it a fair fight.

Of course back in the day this was all supposition and Microsoft did use the fact that Office was faster than SmartSuite (and others) in its marketing material; today we know the truth of the matter: Never trust the Beast of Redmond, they lie.